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I'm curious to explore if contracting makes sense as an alternative to full time employment. How do I start? How do I position and price myself?
An exception might be if you have some super-deep expertise in a particular area, so that you're not really selling your time as a worker, but selling the ability to waltz in, look at something, do a few things that fix a problem someone has been stuck on. That kind of thing is pretty rare, though.
Not going to lie: Most of my clients come from my network and their referrals. Most of my freelancer friends’ clients come from their network and their network referring clients to them. While it is possible to find clients organically through advertising, it’s much easier if you can build a network to pull from.
You can start by simply contacting people you know and asking if their companies need any help. Let them know you’re available. Then, when they ask, be available and solve their problems ASAP.
It’s actually quite a challenge to hold down a full-time job and to freelance at the same time. You might be lucky enough to find clients who don’t care much about how long it takes and are fine to communicate asynchronously through e-mail at your convenience. However, most clients will want to get on video calls throughout the day and will expect the work to be done quickly. Realistically, it will start competing with your day job at some point. You should decide now how you’re going to handle that.
Whatever you do, don’t use your work computer for any freelancing tasks. Neither party may ever find out, but if you get into a situation where it matters then it’s terrible to have intermingled the two.
Finally: Don’t underestimate how good a stable, big company job is right now. Freelancing isn’t really the easy money that some people make it out to be, especially if you’re not actually free during the day because you have a job. If you’re looking for something different, consider just getting a different job.
Finding clients is basically the hardest part. Not going to lie: Most of my clients come from my network and their referrals. Most of my freelancer friends’ clients come from their network and their network referring clients to them. While it is possible to find clients organically through advertising, it’s much easier if you can build a network to pull from. You can start by simply contacting people you know and ask…
I did a bit of asking around last year and I found several opportunities where companies have small average quality engineering teams who need someone to lead an effort in something like a product manager and engineering architect role. Those sounded interesting, though I did not follow up.
My main fear is pay. Ideally, I'd like to be able to make at least $300/hr. I have no idea if that's realistic. Maybe not at first?
I also work in electronics, which is in a very weird place right now, and I’m a bit concerned that I might be taking some risks here, but it is what it is.
I was contacted for an interview, and I told the company that I wanted to work on my own, but I’d be willing to consult and work for them as a freelancer if they wanted.
After that is just a sequence of problem solving specific steps that will depend on where you live, your situation, etc..
Finding clients is basically the hardest part. Not going to lie: Most of my clients come from my network and their referrals. Most of my freelancer friends’ clients come from their network and their network referring clients to them. While it is possible to find clients organically through advertising, it’s much easier if you can build a network to pull from. You can start by simply contacting people you know and ask…
This. Also don't underestimate how hard it is to get the money from a client if they decide not to pay you, even if you did a good job.
Project based contracting by comparison, is almost exclusively network based. That's the fun contracting. You can try and shortcut it by using a freelance platform like UpWork but they're not great.
You should start with one person who's willing to hire you. This will likely be somebody you have worked with in the past, or some close associate of theirs. Ideally, would be a part-time gig so that you don't have to give up your day job. That will let you set up the necessary systems and habits and get a better sense of whether this is for you.
If you don't have that person already at hand, you can instead start work on your sales process, which will likely mainly be a networking process. Set up time to talk to trusted former colleagues. Tell them you're thinking of switching to contract work. Ask them about how they perceive you, and in particular what kind of work they think you'd be great at. Then ask them what kinds of contract work they're seeing happen now, or have heard about happening. Lastly, ask them if there's anybody they know you should talk to, including both contractors and the kinds of people who hire contractors. If you're lucky, they'll say, "Oh, yeah, let me introduce you to Jane."
If you keep this up, you will eventually find somebody who might want to hire you. Then you're into a negotiation and contracting process. There are plenty of books about this, and I'd encourage you to read a few of them, as it's not much like normal job hiring. (The only one I remember is "Getting to Yes", which is very helpful theory, but you'll also want stuff on the nuts and bolts of it.)
My big pieces of advice: 1) Both contract work and payments are much less reliable than jobs. Keep a big cash buffer. Right after the dot-com bust I would have made better money picking recycling out of trash cans than doing contract programming, but I got through because I had saved up. Later that saved me when a client tried to stiff me for $40k 2) For getting future work, it's important to leave everybody with a good impression of you. So do you best to be kind, warm, competent, professional, and polished. 3) Outsource the headache. Find yourself a good lawyer and tax accountant. Consider using a billing firm that just takes care of all the paperwork and pays you on a W2. Focus your energy on the three core things: doing the actual work, managing clients, and finding new work. 4) Don't expect to make more than with a job. You might! But non-billable activities can eat up a lot of your time, and many contractors do it because they like the freedom.
Good luck! Feel free to drop me a line if I can answer more questions for you.